Even though North Korea is known to have extremely limited Internet service, the Web-based bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay announced today that it relocated to this closed-off and highly censored country.

"The Pirate Bay has been hunted in many countries around the world. Not for illegal activities but being persecuted for beliefs of freedom of information. Today, a new chapter is written in the history of the movement, as well as the history of the internets," The Pirate Bay wrote in a blog post. "Today we can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network."

It appears that the announcement is a hoax and a commentary on how the Western world is cracking down on file sharing and piracy. However, it's a highly technical prank. To those using the service, it would seem that the site's IP address is located in Pyongyang, North Korea.

However, according to a German programmer, the service is actually using some sort of IP spoofing. This spoofing makes it seem like the links are coming out of North Korea when they are really being hosted by a site from somewhere in Europe.

Late last month, The Pirate Bay announced that it was shifting its operational duties from Sweden to Norway and Spain. Previously, the Swedish Pirate Party was providing it with the bandwidth it needed to operate its site. However, the Rights Alliance, an organization backed by the biggest music and movie companies, threatened to sue the Swedish Pirate Party over its support.

Over the past year The Pirate Bay has been armoring itself against police raids and the possibility of being shut down. It first got rid of trackers and then it tossed its torrents last February and started using magnet links. In October, it ditched its servers and moved to several cloud-hosting providers in different countries around the world. Theoretically, this made its data more secure since it's not being hosted in just one place.

"We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high," The Pirate Bay said in the blog post today. "And to our help comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information."

About the author

Dara Kerr is a staff writer for CNET focused on the sharing economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado where she developed an affinity for collecting fool's gold and spirit animals.
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